1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to networking and in particular to automatically renew established network connections.
2. Background Information
With the proliferation of networked computers, providing reliable connections has become important. An example is establishing a reliable connection among two or more computers that are assigned a dynamic Internet Protocol (IP) address in order to guarantee correct data exchange therebetween. A dynamic IP address is subject to a “lease time”, which is a parameter that determines the time set by a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server to make use of that IP address. In almost all provider-based network services the lease time must be renewed (e.g., via a DHCPREQUEST in DHCP protocol). Typically, a computer with a dynamic address allows data exchange while the IP address and therefore the connection remains active. Due to traffic congestion, however, the DHCP server could unpredictably remove the leased address if it does not have a large amount of IP addresses to share among users (very frequent in case of small network providers). Furthermore, if a communication session with a computer is based on a connectionless protocol, then the computer has no knowledge of renewal of its IP address, resulting in loss of the communication session.